


Heroics

by pastelplastic



Category: G.I. Joe (Cartoon), G.I. Joe - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, even more sunbowesque nonsense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29880756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pastelplastic/pseuds/pastelplastic
Summary: Cobra Commander accidentally saves millions of lives. Now he's a hero! Or at least, everyone thinks he is.It's all very silly.
Relationships: Anastasia "Baroness" DeCobray/James McCullen Destro XXIV, cobra commander/zartan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

Cobra Commander sat slumped in his chair, feet up on the console keyboard, and tapped aimlessly at his phone. He'd run out of lives in Candy Crush and couldn't buy more because the Baroness had recently put a parental lock on microtransactions.

His present location was the middle of Nobody Cares, Texas. The site had once been home to some kind of quarry, but whoever owned it was long gone now. They’d left behind rusted excavation equipment, outdated electronics, and a bottle of some very expired orange juice which he’d paid a viper twenty dollars to drink. The medics said he would be fine in a day or two.

In any case, the quarry seemed like a good place to hide a couple missile silos. You never knew when you’d need a good missile silo. Better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it. Right?

"Commander!" cried a voice.

"Whaaaaat," grumbled the commander, letting his feet hit the ground. He looked up into the face--or mask, at least--of a crimson guardsman. His shoulders heaved, like he'd run all the way here from wherever he'd been.

"Commander, we need to evacuate this base,” he said. ‘Base’ was pretty generous; the old trailers that had once served as offices and dormitories for the workers were barely habitable. “The site has been compromised.”

"What do you mean?" demanded Cobra Commander. 

"The titan. It’s reemerged from the ocean and it’s moving in our direction. We think it may have noticed our operation--"

"Titan?" Behind his mask, Cobra Commander blinked in confusion. "What titan?"

"The--the experimental war machine that escaped from Revanche Robotics last week?” The guard sounded confused, like he thought this was something the commander ought to know or care about. “It's been all over the news--it attacks everything it sees--"

"Whatever," said Cobra Commander. "Blow it up. And then tell those technicians to get to work."

"Commander, the titan has taken out several major cities already. The Americans haven't been able to stop it. It ate a tank--"

Cobra Commander glanced at his phone screen again. The countdown timer said he wouldn't get a new life for another ten minutes. "I have to do everything myself around here," he muttered in dismay.

“Commander, wait--” protested the guard, but Cobra Commander shoved past him.

A few minutes later, he was piloting a Cobra flight pod towards the looming silver monster on the horizon. 

The titan, or whatever everyone was calling it, was a little bigger than the commander had been expecting. It loomed on the horizon like a mountain. A very shiny mountain. At least, he hoped this was the titan. He’d be pretty embarrassed if he destroyed this thing and then it turned out it wasn’t. 

But he was pretty sure it was. 

The titan didn't have a humanoid shape like a BAT; it looked more like a giant turtle, with lots of thick, short legs and a huge domed body. It was a bit of a mess, to be honest. There were turrets upon turrets upon turrets, flashing lights, and little silver creatures that scurried to and fro over the dome’s surface with no immediately apparent purpose. The whole thing had been designed by someone with no sense of aesthetics.

Cobra Commander switched off his radio, because apparently everyone had decided that yelling into the channel was The Thing To Do Now. He'd have to send out a memo about minimizing comm chatter after he dealt with this robot interloper. He let autopilot take over and made a note in his phone reminding himself to do just that. Then he remembered the flight pods didn't have autopilot capabilities installed and grabbed the controls to veer back on course.

As Cobra Commander neared the titan, he wondered how he would know when he had it's attention. It didn't really have a head or eyes, though he was sure some of the nonsense covering its frame was sensors. He swooped in low, low enough to see his own reflection in the titan's shiny hull. Turrets spun to life, and he grabbed the throttle, blasting out of range at full power. He had its attention!

As he flew in the direction of the quarry, he looked back over his shoulder to see if the titan was following him. It was difficult to tell with all the incoming missiles blocking his view. He rose higher into the air, through the clouds. The flight pod’s systems beeped out a warning about oxygen and elevation and whatever nerd shit it was on about. Cobra Commander ignored it because he was not a nerd. The missiles collided with one another, lighting the clouds from below and rocking the little flight pod from side to side.

"I am the only one who does any work around here," he griped.

He dipped below the clouds again to make sure the titan was still following him. It wasn’t very fast, but that was okay because the flight pod wasn’t either--at least, not when compared to actual fighter jets. But fighter jets were difficult to pilot. They had lots of buttons and screens and stuff and Wild Weasel always screamed "DON'T TOUCH THAT!" whenever he tried to learn. 

But that wasn’t a problem because he was not meant to be a fighter pilot. He was destined for greater things.

He flew onward, checking occasionally to be sure he was still being pursued. The titan was still firing at him, forcing him to weave and dodge around rock formations, or hide above the cloudline. He led the titan on an erratic path that he didn’t think its software would be able to predict, even if it was very shiny and fancy. 

When they were nearly at their destination, Cobra Commander brought the flight pod down so that he was about level with the titan's dome. To his surprise, a seam opened up down the middle of it, revealing what he could only describe as the inside of a paper shredder. The blades began to spin, sucking in air and debris. The flight pod shuddered as it, too, was caught in the gust.

"HOW DARE YOU!" yelled Cobra Commander, but he wasn't actually that offended. He just liked to yell 'how dare you' because it made him feel important. He grabbed the throttle and blasted ahead, breaking free of the current. The titan pursued him on all its fat little legs, turrets spinning and ugly mouth churning. It was so focused on the commander that it did not notice it was approaching the massive granite pit that he’d found yesterday while searching for interesting rocks. 

Cobra Commander spun the flight pod around just in time to watch the titan step forward into the empty air. It did not hang there in midair like a cartoon character before tumbling head over feet into the cavern below, but whenever he told the story later on he swore that it had.

In any case, it was nearly four hundred feet to the bottom of the pit. After it disappeared from view, there was a moment of silence, followed by a crash, and then an explosion that nearly knocked the flight pod out of the air.

When most of the fire was gone, Cobra Commander landed the pod and peered into the pit. It was hard to see exactly what the titan looked like now, but there were no more blinking lights or spinning parts.

For some reason, his phone was going crazy. 

He swiped through the messages--apparently a lot of people wanted to let him know he was a dumbass?--and began to walk back to base. He could have flown, but he couldn't pilot the pod and read his messages at the same time, and his phone always took priority.

A new video call was coming in. He answered it, and Destro's face filled the screen. This was a little strange, because Destro wasn’t part of the current mission, but maybe he wanted to sell the commander a laser that fired snakes or something. 

"Commander!" Destro barked. "Did you destroy the titan?"

"Yes. About three seconds ago." He looked back at the smoking pit to make sure it was still there. It was. "How did you know?"

"How did I--?" Destro sputtered. "I was tracking it via satellite! I’ve been trying to destroy it for days!"

"Oh, yeah?" The commander nearly tripped over some rocks. "Agh! Sorry, talking and walking."

"Commander--do you not understand the significance of--do you not realize--the titan has been the only story on the news for a week!"

"I've mostly been playing Candy Crush," said the commander.

Apparently this was not what Destro wanted to hear.

"I HAVEN'T SLEPT IN FORTY EIGHT HOURS!" roared Destro. "THAT THING HAS KILLED TWO MILLION PEOPLE! THE UNITED STATES ARMY HIRED ME TO FIND A WAY TO DESTROY IT! NOTHING WE'VE TRIED HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL! AND YOU DROPPED IT IN A PIT AND SOMEHOW THAT WORKED!?"

"Wait, you're cheating on me?" asked the commander in dismay. "With the US Army?"

"PUT ANA ON THE PHONE!"

"Stop yelling at me! You're going to make me cry." There were a lot of people gathered outside the base. Good, one of them could go back and retrieve the pod. "Wait, I have to go. The men need inspiration and guidance. I'll call you back."

"Commander, you don't understand--"

"Loveyoubye!" He ended the call. Destro was always so melodramatic. Sometimes that could be fun but right now it was just giving him a headache. 

He awkwardly half-jogged the rest of the way back to the trailers. His men were a sea of blue and red uniforms, with one black at the forefront. When he came within arm’s reach, she slapped him across the face. Her armored glove hit his armored head with a clang. 

“You absolute imbecile!” the Baroness cried. She didn’t usually yell at him in public, so he knew he was in real trouble. “I should drive you to the nearest psychiatric hospital and leave you there! What were you thinking? What were you _thinking_?”

Cobra Commander knew from experience that she didn’t really want an answer from him. She just wanted to be angry for a little bit. And that was fine, because sooner or later she’d start yelling in Russian, which he did not speak, and he could pretend she was exclaiming over how smart and handsome and great he was. 

But before that could happen, the Baroness turned back to the other gathered soldiers. 

“We are evacuating this area!” she announced. “The titan may be in a self-repair state, and the Americans could arrive at any moment. Leave anything that cannot be carried.”

The Baroness was pretty smart--she could type without looking at the keyboard and knew how to get the cap off a medicine bottle--but Cobra Commander did not think she was right about the titan being in a self-repair state.

But if they were leaving, he needed to take a selfie with the titan right away. He cursed himself for not thinking of it at the time. But the inside of the pit had been so dark. Would he even be able to get a good picture?

“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Commander?”

“I just--” He pointed back in the direction of the quarry. 

“No! Go inside and pack your things and then sit quietly until we’re ready to leave. I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

Cobra Commander’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. “You’re mean sometimes,” he muttered. But then his phone buzzed again, distracting him. He really did have a lot of messages. And a lot of twitter notifications too. 

He opened the app cautiously. He’d had about forty thousand followers this morning, a combination of Cobra personnel, fashionistas who liked his capes, and herpetologists who liked his snake-themed life. Now he had five hundred thousand. 

Now he had six hundred thousand.

Now he had seven hundred thousand. 

The number kept moving. 

Cobra Commander swallowed, took a few deep breaths, and clicked one of the notifications at random. It led him to the feed of someone who appeared to be one of his own soldiers. Someone had filmed the titan pursuing his flight pod across the quarry. From the quality of the footage, it looked like it had been done on a cell phone.

Cobra Commander wasn’t a narcissist or anything, but he thought the video made him look… really cool, actually. The titan had seemed so much smaller from inside the flight pod. Filmed from the ground, it was sort of terrifying. He winced as his pod just barely avoiding the incoming missiles. He hadn’t realized how close some of them had come to hitting him. 

The video ended with the titan falling down the mineshaft, and Cobra Commander landing the flight pod to investigate. All the comments below were… favorable. Very favorable. Shockingly favorable. An unprecedented level of favorable. True, some commenters were decrying the footage as fake, but most people seemed convinced. 

Could it be that the universe was finally acknowledging his greatness? That he was finally getting the accolades he deserved? He continued to scroll through the comments, a deranged smile spreading across his masked face. 

“You haven’t even started packing, have you?” demanded the Baroness. She carried a MARS-branded backpack over one shoulder. “Have you even moved from this spot?” 

Cobra Commander looked up from his phone screen at last. “I don’t have to pack,” he said. “I’m a _hero_.”


	2. Chapter 2

There was a lot of yelling happening today, Cobra Commander reflected as he sat at his desk and pushed his paperwork around so it would look like he was working on it. Nobody was really yelling _at_ him, exactly, but they were yelling in his general direction and it was starting to make him tired. 

For example, the twins had come to show him some charts with lines and numbers on them. All the lines were going upward and all the numbers were green, so Cobra Commander was pretty sure this was good. The twins had said words like “shareholders” and “unprecedented” and “options” and “percent.” There had been other words between those words too but Cobra Commander couldn’t remember what they were. He hadn’t really been able to tell if they were happy or mad. Mostly they were just loud. Especially when they shouted in unison. 

Then he’d had a meeting with Cobra’s PR department, which was sort of surprising because he hadn’t heard from him since the Thing that happened last spring and he’d sort of been hoping they’d all died.

Cobra Commander’s relationship with the PR department was… complicated. He liked the photo shoots they did, especially the ones where they brought in real live snakes for him to hold and pose with dramatically. He’d once held a king cobra on a globe and that had been the best day of his life. He liked the commercials they made, and the number of people they recruited, and the autobiography they’d ghostwritten for him. He hadn’t actually read it, but the cover was a picture of him punching a shark.

But he didn’t like how they were always trying to convince him to let them take over his twitter account and run it “properly” and “professionally.” He didn’t like how they said things like, “Azure isn’t really an intimidating color.” He didn’t like how they tried to edit down his speeches so to be “concise” and “less rambling.” One time they’d even suggested dubbing over his voice!

And then there was the Thing. The Thing last spring. The Spring Thing.

The Thing was a little difficult to explain. You sort of had to be there. But the general idea was Cobra Commander had been called down to take some more photographs and when he arrived, they gave him a sort of military-looking outfit to wear. The Baroness, who was supposed to be photographed with him, was given a dress with a very short skirt. 

The Baroness hadn’t liked the dress. She hadn’t said so, but he could tell by the way she held it in her hands and pressed her lips together and breathed loudly through her nose. Cobra Commander thought it was a nice dress, but didn’t look like her style at all. It was colorful and shiny and short. Still, it was much more eye-catching than the boring uniform he’d been given, so he’d suggested they trade.

She’d sort of laughed, which was nice because up to that point she hadn’t smiled once, and hadn’t stopped him when he took the dress out of her hands and ran to the changing room. 

But the PR people had refused to do the photoshoot. And it had all ended in a big fight with Cobra Commander swearing he’d have them all killed for insulting his legs. He hadn’t followed up on this because he’d forgotten to. He still had the dress, though. He was going to wear it to the Christmas party this year.

Anyway, he’d met with the PR department today and they’d said a lot of words but none of it really seemed to mean anything. They’d said ‘if’ a lot. ‘If’ and ‘maybe’ and ‘possibly.’ There’d been other words between those words but not very many. It was mostly ‘if’. _If_ you get the presidential medal of freedom, _if_ the island is granted sovereign nation status, _if_ public approval remains high--

If, if, if. Cobra Commander had no patience for hypotheticals. He was a man of action.

He would take a medal if it was offered, though. 

Cobra Commander opened up his phone and googled ‘presidential medal of freedom.’ The first few articles were about him. He thought that was a good sign, even if the headlines did mostly end in question marks. Going by the pictures, the medal came on a ribbon you could wear around your neck, and it came with a ceremony and everything. 

He hoped there would be food afterwards. Maybe they’d let him make a speech?

He closed the browser and started a new video call. Zartan picked up on the first ring. 

“Commander,” said Zartan, turning away from whatever he’d been doing very rapidly. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you today.”

“I can’t talk long, everyone wants to shout at me today,” said Cobra Commander. “Did you hear I’m a hero?”

The commander’s relationship with Zartan was complicated, but not bad-complicated like his relationship with Cobra PR. It was good-complicated. Last Valentine’s day, Destro had brought the Baroness a frankly ridiculous amount of flowers and also a pair of glasses with autotargeting capabilities. While she wandered around the base looking for someone to test the glasses on, Zartan had stolen some of the flowers off her desk and given them to the commander.

It was good-complicated. 

But Zartan wasn’t really smiling. Actually, he was not smiling at all. He was doing the opposite of smiling, which was frowning. “Commander, what were you thinking?” He didn’t shout the words, but something about the tone of his voice was far worse than any shouting could ever be. 

“What?” said Cobra Commander. “No, no, we’re done with the Everyone Is Mad At The Commander phase. We’ve moved on to The Commander Gets Medals and a Party phase. That’s why I called you. I want--”

“Commander,” interrupted Zartan, which meant it was serious. “Commander, you could have been ripped to pieces in seconds. I still don’t understand how you managed to survive, unless the whole thing was a hoax.”

“It’s not a hoax!” cried Cobra Commander, offended by the insinuation that he would do such a thing without including Zartan in the proceedings. “I just--I just--” 

He didn’t want to admit to Zartan that he hadn’t had any idea what he was up against before he climbed into the flight pod. That he hadn’t seen any of the videos of the titan shrugging off missiles and regrowing lost limbs and rolling through populated city streets at top speed like a demented oversized bowling ball until after it had already been defeated. 

“What?” asked Zartan. “You just what?”

“I’m fine. Can’t you just be happy for me?”

“How did you keep it from going into bipedal mode?”

“I don’t know.” And he really didn’t. Mostly because he’d only learned that the titan was capable of shifting into a second, more aggressive mode after it was no longer relevant. ‘Attack mode’ was what some news outlets called it. He’d seen footage of it ripping down a building, but tried not to think about it too much because thinking about it too much made his lungs hurt. “Maybe it was damaged already.”

“Do you think it was because you didn’t fire on it?”

“Maybe,” said the commander. “Yes. Definitely. I know what I’m doing, can’t you have some faith in me?”

“It’s not that I don’t have faith in you, I just...” Zartan’s voice trailed off awkwardly, and he raised both hands in a gesture of bewilderment.

“The reason I called is they’re saying I’m going to be awarded the presidential medal of freedom. And I think you should come with me. As my plus one.”

Zartan did not look as happy as he had in Cobra Commander’s imaginings of this moment. “Commander, do you really think it’s wise to go to Washington? It could be a trap.”

“No, no, it’ll be fine,” Cobra Commander waved his hand. “The PR department already said I could.” Or something like that. He hadn’t been paying attention. 

“I’m more interested in what your intelligence department has to say about it.”

“I don’t know, I haven’t asked them yet. I’m sure it will be fine. I’m a hero.”

Zartan exhaled loudly, and his shoulder slumped. “I can’t believe this,” he muttered. He rubbed his face with his hand. “You swear this isn’t a hoax?”

“I swear!” cried Cobra Commander, even though he knew his word was basically worthless. 

Zartan’s hand fell down to his side. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but now I wish I’d let the twins pay us in EE stock like they wanted to. Heard it’s up three hundred percent.”

“Don’t you dare talk about numbers in front of me, Zartan. You know I hate numbers.”

Zartan finally, finally laughed. “All right. I’ll go with you to get your shiny bit of plastic if your intel department says it’s safe. And I want to hear it from the Baroness, not from you.”

“Agreed!” If she tried to say he couldn’t go, he’d threaten to hold his breath until he fainted. There was a knock at the door, and he looked up from the screen. Before he could say “come in” or “enter” or “wait a second while I end this call with this mercenary who I’m not officially dating because we’re still figuring things out but things are looking pretty positive”, the door opened and Destro walked in. 

“I’ve got to go,” said Cobra Commander. “Someone else is here to shout at me. I’ll text you later.” He ended the call and set his phone face down on his desk. “I don’t understand why you bother to knock if you’re just going to come in anyway, Destro.”

“I ought to kill you, Commander.”

“You can’t! I’m going on television tomorrow!” Cobra Commander did not actually believe Destro would kill him, because he was his best customer and bought all the weird inventions that nobody else wanted, like the security statues that came to life and beat intruders to death. “Why are you mad at me? I’ve lost track.”

“I was tracking the titan for days when you--”

“That’s right! I remember now. I forgot but it’s all coming back.” Cobra Commander waved his hands around the general vicinity of his own brain to illustrate. “Wait! I’m mad at you, too! We’re both mad at each other. You were working for the Americans! I’m mad at you!”

Destro looked taken aback. “Commander, the situation was--”

“No! No! Cobra has an exclusive contract with you, and you turn around and work with our enemies?” He slapped his hand down on his desk and jumped to his feet. “What next? Are you going to sell GI Joe a snake laser? A snazer? Are you going to sell them a snazer?”

“Will you shut up and listen to me?”

“I’LL NEVER SHUT UP!” He struck his desk again, knocking over a stack of papers. “You’re dead to me! Get out of my office!”

Clearly this was not how Destro had expected this conversation to go. “Now, Commander,” he began in a significantly softer voice. “You must understand it was a unique situation. There were some charges I needed dropped and the Americans needed the titan destroyed. None of your enemies benefitted in any way.”

“Says you! The titan might have destroyed GI Joe for us!”

“Then why did _you_ destroy it?” asked Destro. 

“Because I--because--GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!” yelled Cobra Commander, pointing towards the door in a very dramatic fashion. But Destro did not get out. He stayed right where he was. Cobra Commander felt his anger dwindling. It was hard to stay really mad about anything when there was so much happening inside his head. 

“All right,” said Destro. “Let’s start over. Commander, I am glad to see you are unharmed from your encounter with the titan, but I wish you had been less reckless. I’m told you took a flight pod without telling anyone.”

“I couldn’t help it. It was my natural heroism shining through,” said Cobra Commander. Destro sputtered with laughter. “Don’t laugh! Men would die for me. Men have died for me. Do you know why that is?”

“Men will die for anything.”

“NO! It’s because I am a natural born leader who serves the people. Stop being rude! I can go back to being mad at you whenever I want!”

Destro sighed heavily. It seemed like a lot of people were doing that today. “Commander, have you considered the long-term implications of your actions?”

“Shareholders stocks options percentages medal freedom sovereign nation party public approval polls internet,” said Cobra Commander, reciting some of the words that had been yelled at him this morning. “To name just a few.”

“What?” said Destro, blinking several times. 

“Did you want anything else? I have an interview this afternoon and I need to memorize the questions. And the answers.” He sat back down in his chair and picked up the script the PR people had given him. Their answers were always so boring, he would probably have to edit them. A few more papers fell off the desk and onto the floor. “I’m very busy, as you can see.”

“You had no idea what you were doing when you destroyed the titan, didn’t you?”

“If you’re going to get hung up on stupid details, do it at your own place,” said the commander, crossing out the entire first answer with a black marker. “I’m going to make the world fall in love with me.”


End file.
